Lesbian modernism : censorship, sexuality and genre fiction / Elizabeth English.

Includes bibliographies and index.

Introduction: Foul minds and foul mouths: censorship and a turn to genre fiction -- Part I: Fantasy. Part I introduction -- 1. 'The book is a sort of touch-stone to other people': sexology, the invert and desire in Katharine Burdekin's utopian fiction -- 2. 'Ghost desire': the lesbian occult and Natalie Clifford Barney's The one who is legion or A.D.'s after-life -- Part II: History. Part II introduction -- 3. 'Spiritual progenitors' and the historical biographies of Margaret Goldsmith and Mary Gordon -- 4. 'I dislike the correct thing in clothes': Virginia Woolf's Orlando: a biography and the cross-dressing historical romance -- Part III: Crime. Part III introduction -- 5. 'Murder is a queer crime': the lesbian criminal and female communities in detective fiction -- 6. 'Lizzie Borden took an axe': repetition and heterosexual crime in Gertrude Stein's detective fiction -- Coda.

Explores the aesthetic dilemma prompted by the censorship of Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness in 1928. Faced with legal and financial reprisals, women writers were forced to question how they might represent lesbian identity and desire. Modernist experimentation has often been seen as a response to this problem, but English breaks new ground by arguing that popular genre fictions offered a creative strategy against the threat of detection and punishment. Her study examines a range of responses to this dilemma by offering illuminating close readings of fantasy, crime, and historical fictions written by both mainstream and modernist authors.--Provided by publisher

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